Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase





2016 | |

How KFC stole a burger-march on McD’s using real time data

Advertiser: QSR Stores Sdn Bhd
Brand: KFC
Creative Agency:
Credits:

The Challenge
It’s been difficult for KFC to get Millennials to try their burgers, with McDonald’s dominating brand love. Most KFC burger innovations aren’t attention-grabbing and the brand simply wasn’t “I’m lovin’ it” hip. We needed to do something different with the launch of the Hot and Cheezy burger.

Insight, Strategy and the Idea
Malaysian youths are fickle foodies thanks to the variety in our cuisine. Just like our changing habits when it comes to food, we had to develop a campaign aligned with what the younger generation liked to view online. But, Millennials are likely to just ‘click’ their way past the mundane. Using programmatic technology to create and distribute brand messaging in a millennial-relevant manner, we developed a campaign that ‘clicked’ with the younger generation.

Our idea: A Hot & Cheezy burger who flirted with Malaysians on YouTube by spouting cheesy lines related to the video currently being watched.

Media Execution
Using data supplied by Google, we create about 10-20 micro videos a week to mirror the top 25 trending videos across 10 categories on YouTube. If you were watching news about Malaysian politics, Hot & Cheezy would ask you to be his Minister of Home Affairs. If you were watching a replay on the online game DOTA 2, he would ask if you were Necrophos (an in-game character) because you are a heartstopper. This was a pioneering effort where we used real-time data to create and distribute content to our audiences. We leveraged on the most popular trending video searches like Adele’s Hello, Lee Chong Wei playing against Chen Long, dialogues by Southern Indian star Rajinikanth, cute cat videos, and more. On Facebook, Hot & Cheezy also personally responded with cheesy lines to fans who had nice things to say about the burger on the KFC page. Even our newspaper ads were programmatic. Hot & Cheezy also appeared in various sections of the newspaper, again with specific cheesy lines tailor-made according to the different sections of the paper: sports, metro, lifestyle, world news, and business. Hot & Cheezy also appeared as his flirty self on Tinder (dating app popular among millennials). Hot & Cheezy called out to users to ‘swipe me right’ with its infamous cheesy lines. Matches on Tinder led to a ‘date’ where big interactive screens allowed the public to chat live with our burger.

Results and Effectiveness
Millennials watched. Viewing completion rates touched 35%, breaking Google Malaysia’s record for pre-roll viewthrough rates. The average view rate for any pre-roll campaign in Malaysia prior to this was only around 17%! They shared. Despite it being a programmatic campaign, millennials loved our videos so much they shared and talked about it. We managed to get, on average, 4X more organic views that previous KFC Malaysia videos. Some videos hit as high as 37% organic views! They visited. 13% more customers visited KFC during the campaign month, the highest in 40 months! KFC’s TopofMind recall increased by 45% to 62% from October 2015 to December 2015, the highest ever! More importantly, they bought. Sales increased by 16% week-on-week, and outperformed targets by 50%! This campaign was awarded Campaign of The Year by FOMA.